The case of a former Akron police captain imprisoned for killing his ex-wife in 1998,
exonerated, freed and then thrown back into jail enters another legal phase after a judge’s
decision yesterday to hear arguments about a new trial.

At issue is the interpretation of an appeals-court ruling last week in the case against Douglas
Prade.

Attorneys for Prade say the state’s 9th District Court of Appeals is requiring Summit County
Judge Christine Croce to order a new trial, while prosecutors say the court left it up to Croce to
decide.

Croce scheduled the hearing for next Monday.

Prade spent nearly 15 years in prison in the shooting death of Dr. Margo Prade, who was killed
in her van outside her Akron medical office. Prade was sentenced to life in prison with a chance
for parole in 26 years.

A now-retired judge exonerated him in January 2013 after DNA tests showed that a bite mark on
Dr. Prade’s lab coat did not come from her ex-husband. She also made what has been described as a “
conditional order” that if her ruling exonerating Prade was overturned, he should receive a new
trial.

Prade was jailed again last month after an appeals-court decision in March to overturn Judge
Judy Hunter’s decision to free Prade.

In its March ruling, the appeals court said the DNA testing raised more questions than answers
and the original conviction was based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence.

The appeals court on Thursday said that to make the motion for a new trial a “final order,” the
judge simply must re-enter the order “granting the motion for a new trial on an unconditional
basis.”

In a filing on Friday, Prade’s attorneys urged Croce to order the new trial. Doing so “requires
not the slightest bit of deliberation or fact-finding,” Prade’s attorneys said.

In her own filing on Friday, Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh asked the judge to deny
a new trial.

“We now know that Prade’s new DNA evidence simply does not exculpate him in any rational way,
(so) there is no reason at all to permit him to take that meaningless and irrelevant evidence to a
jury,” the prosecutor said.